With this new website, we also hope to bring you content on a more frequent basis. We realize that it’s been quiet for too long and we want to make changes on that front. Be sure to take a look at The Tribe page and get to know the people behind Red 5 Studios.

For those of you that are really on the ball, you’ll notice a new Media section. We’ve got some really nice concept work up there for you to enjoy. We’ll continue to update that with new shots as we can. As always, feel free to send your comments to contact@red5studios.com. See you soon.

Our very own Jeff Lawniczak is going to be wandering the floor up in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference. If you see him, be sure to stop him and hand him a business card. Perhaps even take a photo with the man and submit it to us. Who knows what you might get in return…

You can’t get enough of playing and designing multiplayer, competitive shooters. You are almost always at the top of the ranks and have a deep understanding of what makes for fun and competitive gameplay. But you also are able to identify with the needs of casual gamers, recognizing the activities, hooks and helpful UI and feedback elements that will draw more players into your game.

A Typical Day

After enjoying a nice cup of coffee, you jump into a meeting with your feature team: a cross-disciplinary group of artists, designers and programmers that is responsible for weapons design. You realize that a good weapon has to function, feel, look and sound great, so you and the team brainstorm the look and feel of a new weapon you’ve been planning with the designers before dividing up the tasks. You agree to meet back in a day or two to see how things are coming along. Meanwhile, you jump into your second feature team in charge of a particular map for the game. You describe the new weapon that you’ve been planning with the other team, and you quickly sketch out a few ways that it could be useful in the new map. The whole team gets excited about the possibilities, and working together with the weapons team, sets a goal to get weapon and map into next week’s playtest.

Who You Work With the Most

You work closely with the Lead Designer and Class Lead to help set up overall goals for the gameplay and co-ordinate with the team to rally around a common vision. On your feature teams, you are often working with artists and programmers, and together directly implementing the feature your team is responsible for.

What You’ve Done Before

• Experience designing combat systems, levels or other key design elements for multiplayer online shooters.
• Excellent Communication and Organizational skills
• Passion for playing online shooters at a competitive level
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.

You love designing spaces for groups of players to strut their stuff. You live for the hoots and hollers that erupt during a gameplay test based on the levels your team has created. You also love coaching and developing new talent, driving their creativity to create compelling multiplayer competition. You have a strong sense of level flow, balance and timing, but you also have an artistic side, and are comfortable working with artists to ensure your levels are as breathtakingly beautiful as they are fun to play.

A Typical Day

One of the level designers is having trouble getting players to understand what to do in the game. You put your own level work aside for the moment and you listen through the issues and review the playtest feedback from the team. Instead of just stating the solution, you guide the level designer through the problem by asking probing questions and getting them to think through the problems on their own. Eventually a light bulb goes off, and they know what to do, and the two of you form an action plan to address the issue and retest the level.

Who You Work With the Most

Your work puts you in contact with many programmers and designers. Aside from spending your time coaching and developing the other level designers, you are also on your own multi-disciplinary team, creating a key level or encounter for the game. You work with the programmers to improve your tools, and you work with artists to closely weld art and gameplay together. Work with the other team leads to ensure that the work your team is generating is in line with the overall products goals.

What You’ve Done Before

• Senior experience on a multiplayer shooter based title.
• Fluent in at least one type of level editor (UnrealEd, Hammer, etc.)
• Experienced scripting gameplay.
• 3DS Max experience a plus.
• Passion for creating great online games.
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.
• Passion for playing online shooters at a competitive level.

You look at massively multiplayer online games as a collection of systems and code. You love watching players encounter the new features and systems you’ve written, allowing them to interact with the world and perhaps even create new things within it. Item creation, guild systems, spells and abilities—anything the players can interact with is in your purview.

During the design process you’re all about prototyping game systems, and both before and after release you want to make sure the logic on the server that governs these systems is sound. Building upon the fundamental server architecture, you and the other gameplay programmers code the systems players will utilize over and over again.

A Typical Day

You spend your morning working with the design team going over a prototype for the spells and class abilities system. It’s important you determine what underlying technology is necessary if you’re going to make the system work. After coming up with a basic plan you meet with the server and AI engineers to make certain the technology groundwork exists to implement the feature. You outline a basic specification on the wiki and pass it around for input. While you are waiting on feedback, you hit the bug database and knock off the last remaining issues with the last system you implemented.

Who You Work With the Most

You collaborate with the other programmers before implementing any new features or procedural changes, trying to get the best idea on how to tackle any issue. You also spend a lot of time working with the design team. You’re part game designer yourself, but with your programming knowledge you’re able to ask questions and steer the game designers toward feature solutions that take advantage of your existing code and technology. When they propose a feature, you can come back with mechanical solution suggestions that make sense, both to the programmers and the designers.

What You’ve Done Before

• 4+ years C/C++ programmer
• 2+ years programming PC games
• Networked multiplayer experience
• Experience working closely with designers
• Excellent and self-driven optimizer
• Passion for games and MMOs

You are driven to solve difficult architectural challenges in the design and implementation of server clusters and client/server game programming. You enjoy figuring out how to get the most out of multi processor servers and limited bandwidth to support great online gameplay. You are comfortable with complicated multi-threaded environments and asynchronous network code and understand the complexities of highly scalable server architectures.

A Typical Day

You’ve just reconfigured the network protocol to support reliable transport over UDP, now it’s time to test it. You’ve previously created a graphic-less game client that you can use to send well formed and not so well formed packets to your new network layer, running several test protocols to ensure the new transport layer works as intended. Since things seem to be running smoothly, its now time to start adapting the client to support load testing by creating thousands of connections to your new server, the ultimate test before releasing the new code into the daily build.

Who You Work With the Most

Since your work is so central to the game, you end up supporting many designers and programmers on small, multidisciplinary teams to implement gameplay, combat, and many other features. You also work closely with IT to help design the datacenters that will host the game, and you are often mentoring new programmers who have to learn the complexities of the systems you have created.

What You’ve Done Before

• Prior experience implementing network gameplay over TCP/IP or UDP protocols.
• Fluent in C++ and Linux based server environments.
• MySQL experience and familiarity with Web 2.0 scalability techniques.
• Experience coding in highly threaded, asynchronous distributed environments.
• Passion for creating great online games.
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.

Your work makes a game overflowing with awesome content possible. Excellent tools double or triple the productivity of each designer and artist, and make the impossible, possible. You believe tools shouldn’t be “rough around the edges”; they should be polished, well thought-out, and most of all, FUN to use. If the tools you create don’t match the highest standards, how can the games you design?

A Typical Day

You start off spending your morning finishing off a new, fast, indexed search system for game assets. It’s finally done, and the artists who normally spend ten minutes at a time thrashing around just to find one specific asset can now spend more time drawing and less time searching. That three weeks of work just saved the team years of effort, and you can see the results in their productivity. Afterward, while looking through your email, you notice one of the designers mentioning he’s been spending a lot of time doing a task you realize could be automated. You outline a fix that should make the designer’s life easier, get a design together, and start working on a new tool.

Who You Work With the Most

Because the editor interfaces with everyone, you end up working with the entire team. You work with gameplay programmers extensively, defining data standards and supporting new features for the designers and artists to use. You work with designers, artists, and world builders, figuring out what tools you can create to improve their work and talking to them about their needs and what new features you can implement.

What You’ve Done Before

• Prior experience creating great tools, user interfaces or workflows.
• Significant experience and capability with C#.
• Deep understanding of threading and event model within C# and WPF a plus.
• Additional experience with C/C++
• Experience integrating applications with SQL databases.
• Experience designing & implementing GUIs. WPF experience a plus.
• Passion for creating great online games.
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.

You breathe life into the worlds we create. Whether you’re animating a character with two legs or six legs, you make their movements believable and memorable. From the smallest, nuanced gesture to all-out action, your understanding of weight and timing transcends the 2D confines of an animation program, making the player truly connect with their characters and the enemies they fight.

A Typical Day

After a refreshing cup of morning coffee, you sit down and look at the animation work you did yesterday. Is it just you or does that run cycle look a little “floaty”? You call over another animator to get a second opinion – yup, looks like it could use a little more weight. He suggests that after lunch you and he grab a camera and shoot some reference video of that particular run. Later in the afternoon, you take an hour to sit down with one of the modelers and talk about some of the high-level weapons being designed. What could we animate to make them look cooler?

Who You Work With the Most

You and the other animators are a tight-nit group that are regularly critiquing each other’s work. It is vital that animation tips, tricks and techniques are shared within the team. By developing a rapport with the artists and the designers, you’re able to understand where they’re going with different ideas as well, making sure your animations reflect the personalities of the characters and monsters you create.

What You’ve Done Before

• Outstanding animation skills. The ability to give life to both creatures and mechanical objects.
• Experience shipping games with great keyframe animation
• Outstanding animation skills. The ability to give life to both creatures and mechanical objects.
• A thorough understanding of animation using 3DS Max
• Experience rigging using Puppetshop a plus
• Experience with Morpheme or Endorphin a plus
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.

As a technical artist, you live in the world between code and color. You love to figure out how to make a graphics engine sit up and beg, rendering visual effects that inspire and motivate players. You are equally comfortable whipping up a MaxScript or MEL script, as you are jumping into HLSL to tweak a shader.

A Typical Day

The game is coming along nicely, but somehow the graphical elements could use a little tweaking to blend together in a seamless experience. You create a plan to develop a few full-screen shaders to do the trick. You start with saturation controls and then move on to more ambitious techniques like tweaking the unified shader or finding an efficient way to add film grain effects to the game.

Who You Work With the Most

You work closely with the graphics programmers, discussing render pipelines and their effect on artist workflow or final graphics fidelity. You collaborate with your fellow artists frequently, seeking ways to make their job easier with a few scripts, researching and developing techniques for the creation of technical assets such as dynamic grass, light rays and character shaders, and supporting the FX artist with a few custom shader or particle modules.

What You’ve Done Before

• Experience shipping games of high visual quality on Unreal 3 or equivalent shader driven engines.
• Previous experience as a technical artists with shader authoring experience (HLSL/CG)
• Great eye and aesthetic sense. Art background.
• Fluency in MaxScript, or ability to pick it up quickly
• Great sense of efficient code and an understanding of modern rendering pipelines
• Great people skills, able to work in multi-disciplinary, team oriented environments.
• A sense of fun.

Send resume and cover letter to:

Red 5 Studios Email: jobs@red5studios.com

That’s right. Red 5 took on Robotron 2084.

The Quiet Before the Storm

Life at Red 5 was, at one time, idyllic: developers and designers scampering through the hallways, drinking from crystalline brooks, designing a killer video game—you know, the typical pastoral idyll of a game studio.

But peace could not last. On a cold, gray morning in October of 2006, Aaron Hightower issued a challenge to the tribe: within the next twelve months, the first person to score one million points on Robotron’s maximum difficulty (see below) would receive one thousand dollars from him.

To sweeten the pot, Red 5 promptly matched the bounty. The game’s creator, Eugene Jarvis, even offered a bottle of wine from his own vineyard. Cash? Free alcohol? The temptation was too great. Cubicle gladiators hailing from as far away as, well, the reception area lined up to meet the challenge. Prospective heroes lined up to rescue Mommy, Daddy and Mikey from the scurrilous Hulks and Brains. Each effort was more valiant than the last, but in vain. The closest score was John Robinson’s impressive 600,000 points, but Hightower’s challenge was still unmet, and its prize still unclaimed. Hightower was beginning to fear that he would have to stand alone as a Robotron ‘millionaire’, doomed to eventually fall to the infinite Robotron hordes…

But in the eleventh hour, John Robinson re-entered the ring. His fingers moved like lightning, and countless bodies of Enforcers and Progs collected at his feet. When the dust settled, his score was 1,008,175, and Red 5 had found its champion. A champion who was two thousand dollars (and one giant check) richer.

Congratulations, John!

By “maximum difficulty” on Robotron 2084, we mean difficulty set to 10, three lives to start, and an extra life every 25,000 points.

Kneel before Zod, baby.